Quest means business reading for leading article

Quest Means Business: Reading for Leading and Quality Education Richard Quest presents two very fascinating shows on CNN, one of my favorite channels in addition to BBC and EuroNews. The two shows are: Quest Means Business and Best of Quest.

Both shows are informative and of a very high quality not only to those who are interested in businesses and the business news but to anyone who would like to get to know what is going on around us in the modern world. There are different items about the usual stuff related to businesses: profits, losses, mergers, expansions, retractions, shares, etc. I am interested in everything in the shows but there is one item which is of particular interest for me. This is the interview or discussion item with a leading business personality, usually a CEO, and sometimes a creative person who is adding something new to the business sector in terms of a new product, service, or interesting and innovative insights. There is almost always a question by Richard Quest to the interviewee: what is the book are you reading for leading? This is a great insight about reading. We do not read only for pleasure or information; we read to be real and effective leaders. This entails that reading enhances leadership. This is very true not about business leaders but about every leader in all walks of life and anywhere in the world. If you go to history and read about the great leaders, you will find that the great leaders in the human history were really great readers. The question in the show is very pertinent to the show and to the audience. If you want to be an effective leader, you really need to be a great reader. In addition to the numerous joys of reading, the act of reading offers insights, some are very deep, about how to deal with people and events and how to handle emergencies, to name but few benefits of reading for leading. Many of the answers given by the business leaders in the shows are about reading books; some are unrelated to the business sector but they are related, in many cases, to human behavior and human mentality. Still they are very useful and insightful for leadership.

This concept of “Reading for Leading” is of great importance for higher education in the modern world. Higher education cannot be reduced to “training for jobs” only. This training is only one function of higher education institutions but it cannot be the only function. Education, and in particular higher education, is a great deal more than training for jobs. We need leaders, creators and innovators in addition to qualified graduates to fill the jobs available on the job markets. It is really a mockery of higher education to reduce this education to “training for jobs”, which are mostly simple jobs for which the students do not need to study for four or five years to be qualified for them. It may be quite sufficient to have “job training programs” for a reasonable period of time, depending upon the nature of the job; this period is usually measured in months than in years.

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Quality education then cannot be achieved through reducing this education to “dull” lectures based on “tiny handouts” pirated from chapters of books which the students have never seen or read. The student academic life in some colleges and universities has been reduced to a worthless process of quizzes, tests and exams which, in some programs, are of a very low level— sometimes lower than a high school!

There is no education without extensive reading of books. Instead of 5 books, we should have 10; instead of 10, we should have 20. This is how we enhance the quality of education. If we want real education then, we should get both the teachers and the students into the habits of reading. But, unfortunately, many teachers have become “robots” teaching students in a very mechanical way: they teach the same material year after year without any addition to knowledge or even to the “handouts” they have illegally photocopied and paid for by the students themselves! These teachers do not see it is their job to read and educate themselves or add new knowledge to the materials they use and practice. Teaching for them has just become the source for living and nothing more!

In many countries in the world, you find that most, if not all, students keep themselves busy using their mobile phones rather than reading books or doing academic activities to enhance their skills of doing things or getting new knowledge in their specialized fields. All they are after is to pass the prescribed tests and exams and, ultimately, get their degrees and certificates which are mostly “worthless pieces of paper”. This is one reason for the high unemployment we witness almost everywhere. Companies and businesses are not prepared, of course, to offer jobs to graduates who are unqualified in any way. This is not the higher education we are after. It is a very damaging sort of corruption and wastage, especially at these critical times of scarce financial resources.

Instead of filling the libraries with books and encouraging students to read and seek knowledge, general and specialized, some senior managers in colleges and universities indulge in deception and “dishonest” malpractices to “enhance” their fake “academic reputation” such as organizing what they call a “cultural week” which has nothing to do with culture at all. It is a full week of “cultural waste” when, at best, both teachers and students waste their time on the campus and, at worst, students leave for their villages and towns leaving the teachers surfing the Internet in their offices. The result is obvious: wasting the valuable time of the academic year which is already under strain because of the high rate of student absence. Instead of buying books for the students and boasting of their big and comprehensive libraries, these same senior managers waste huge amounts of money in useless activities and failed projects. They find these activities as good opportunities for embezzling money from the college and university budgets. This usually happens when the senior managers themselves have no higher education qualifications or are not interested in reading at all! They are interested only in how to fill their pockets with money. They have “crept” into their positions due to personal relationships rather than through academic and leadership merit.

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It is not surprising then to find that higher education is in a mess in many countries in the world nowadays. In the recent university ranking broadcast by the BBC on 5 May 2016, only 17 universities in all Asia are among the 100 top universities in the world. China and Japan have only 5 higher education institutions on the top.

The highest rated Asian universities are the University of Tokyo in Japan in 12th place and China's Tsinghua University in 18th place and Peking University in 21st place and the National University of Singapore in 26th place.

Three London universities stay in the top third of the reputation table - Imperial College London at 15, University College London at 20 and the London School of Economics and Political Science at 24 - but each has fallen slightly on last year's ranking.

The US dominates the Times Higher Education (THE) reputation rankings, with Harvard and MIT in top places.

These are rankings based on reputation and perceived status as per the opinions of an international panel of academics. They are separate from the university rankings based on research and teaching quality.

When you go to any respectable university in the world, the lecturer would give you for each course a list of Readings, another list for Recommended Readings, and a third list for Further Readings. This is the minimum. You go to another university run by unqualified, uneducated and vulgar senior management, they ask you to make up your “handouts” for the students or specify the chapters for the students to photocopy at their expense, which is of course unprofessional, illegal and unethical. The students never see or touch a book in their four or five years of academic study. These same “scam” universities boast, in their vision and mission, that they aspire to lead higher education in the world! What a disaster!

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